The Friends of George Soros

On October 28, 2004, just a few days before the election, George Soros spoke to the National Press Club. It was the last date in his national anti-Bush speaking tour. Soros is the most prominent drug legalizer in the world but campaigned to get Bush out of office mainly because of the Iraq war issue. Five television stations or networks, including C-SPAN, were there to record or cover the event. The media covered Soros but ignored the attack on an anti-drug activist, Steven Steiner, who had walked to the podium and had attempted to say a few words about his son, who had died of a drug overdose. Steiner was surrounded and led away, where he was thrown into a door, injured and hospitalized. His hospital bill was $670.

You didn’t hear or read about that, and you also didn’t learn that one of the “guests of Soros” on the dais was David Fenton, chairman of a controversial public-relations firm that represented Soros on his national speaking tour and has also served as a registered foreign agent. Fenton also represents the Soros-funded MoveOn.org and has worked for the Heinz Family Foundations, associated with you know who. Fenton’s career began as a photographer for Liberation News Service, which boasted contacts with communist guerrilla forces during the Vietnam War. Liberation News Service was named in honor of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, the phony “nationalist movement” established by Hanoi.

In the past, Fenton has represented the Salvadoran guerrillas, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, CIA defector Philip Agee, the Marxist government of Grenada and communist Angola. Over his 20-year career as a publicist, Fenton has had extraordinary success in manipulating the media. In the summer of 2003, Fenton represented the Environmental Working Group and claims to have “placed” one of its stories on “hundreds” of other broadcast and print outlets.

Fenton represented the “Freedom to Marry” homosexual rights group and hired Cathy Renna, formerly of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). Other Fenton clients have included the Ford Foundation, the (Ted) Turner Foundation, and the Tides Foundation.

In his book, ironically titled The Politics of Truth, the discredited former Ambassador Joseph Wilson describes his contacts with MoveOn.org and Win Without War, a group also represented by Fenton. He says he joined with these groups in the unsuccessful effort to block the $87-billion appropriation bill to fund U.S. troops in combat. For over a year, the media echoed Wilson’s charge that President Bush lied about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa?a charge that was disproved by a Senate Intelligence Committee and a British report directed by Lord Butler in July 2004.

In his book, written when he was a media darling, Wilson named those who bought into his story. They included Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, Chris Matthews of MSNBC, Walter Pincus and David Broder of the Washington Post, David Corn of The Nation magazine, Bill Moyers of the Public Broadcasting Service, filmmaker Robert Greenwald, and CNN’s Lou Dobbs.